Report to Grego (59 page)

I closed the window with great haste. I had decided to depart for Moscow.

M
IRACLE
butts against reality, makes a hole, and enters. When the time was ripe, Lenin gathered together his rags and tatters, made a thick package of his manuscripts, tied all his worldly possessions into a bundle, and bade farewell to his landlord, the Swiss cobbler who had rented him a room in his house in Switzerland.

“Where are you going, Vladimir Ilich?” said the landlord, holding Lenin's hand and regarding him with pity. “What madness makes you want to return to Russia? What will you do there? Do you suppose you'll find a room in Russia—or work? Take my advice, Vladimir Ilich, and stay here in peace.”

“I have to go, I have to,” Lenin replied.

“Have to? Why?”

“I have to,” Lenin calmly repeated.

“But you paid all your rent and the month is not over yet. You realize of course, that I'm not going to refund the difference.”

“It doesn't matter,” Lenin answered him. “Keep it. I have to leave.”

And he left. He set foot on Russian soil with his little cap, his clean frayed shirt, his shabby coat—an army of one, stubby, pale, and unarmed. Over against him: the boundless Russian land, the sinister, brutalized muzhiks, the roisterous aristocrats, the all-powerful priesthood, the fortresses, palaces, prisons, and barracks, the old laws, the old morals, and the knout. The fearful empire, armed to the teeth. There he stood with his little cap, his tiny Mongolian eyes staring fixedly into the air, while inside him a dancing, whistling demon gnashed his teeth and spoke.

“All this is yours, Vladimir Ilich. I give it to you—free! Just say one phrase, say the magic phrase I've been dictating to you for so many years: ‘Workers of the world, unite!' Say it, and czars, gold
braid, goat-bearded priests, well-dressed, well-fed pot-bellies—with one puff they'll all fall down on their backs. March over their carcasses, Vladimir Ilich! Forward, lad, march over their carcasses and climb. Nail the red flag to the Kremlin. Smash in their skulls with the hammer; slit their throats with the sickle!”

“Who are you?” Lenin kept asking him, listening with clenched fists to the demon inside him. “Tell me your name. I want to know who you are.”

“I am the Miracle,” replied the demon, and with, his horns he butted Russia.

Until now few men have been able to look at Russia with clear, impartial eyes, unable to see its many-faceted countenance of abundant shadow and light as one unified sphere. A great gulf divides the Slavic soul from the Western. The Russian is able to harmonize inner contradictions which are incompatible to the European's rationality. The European places ratiocination above everything else, limpid ratiocination subjected to a rational scale of values. The Russian places the soul above everything else, the dark, rich, contradictory, intricate force which pushes man beyond rationality to violent, irresponsible passion. In him the blind creative forces still have not crystallized into a rational hierarchy. The Russian is still tightly glued to the soil; he is filled with earth and world-engendering darkness.

I considered Lenin's face, that face so filled with light and flame. Before me I saw the dark dough—the muzhik—which this obstinate mind had undertaken to knead. I yearned with ever-increasing vehemence to view the two primordial, implacable enemies and allies, Spirit and Matter, wrestling inside the Kremlin's closed, bloody arena.

The snow was falling thickly; it blanketed the entire tilled plain. Beneath the snow the sown wheat took its nourishment. The muzhiks moved tranquilly, without haste, as though eternal. Now and then a pitch-black crow winged silently by, headed for human habitation, to eat.

I waited many hours for the train, surrounded in the station by Mongolian faces, slanting eyes, beards filled with the shells of melon seeds, two women fortunetellers tossing cards, an elderly muzhik pouring tea into a little sancer and sucking it up thunderously with animalistic joy, Chinese mothers wrapped in filth)
quilts, their infants bound to their backs or hanging from their necks like kangaroos—a warm human mass which sweated and reeked. The air smelled everywhere like a stable, perhaps like the stable of Bethlehem.

Midday came, evening bore down; we waited. The faces were grave and peaceful around me. No one darted outside to see if the train was coming or not. Everyone waited, certain that today, or tomorrow, the train would appear without fail. They did not count the hours with a watch. They knew that time is a nobleman, a great duke, and they were afraid to contradict him.

Toward dawn the train's whistle sounded in the distance. All the people rose and gathered their bundles, once more without any haste. An old graybeard who had stretched out at my side and snored the whole night long looked at me now and winked triumphantly, as though to say, Well, my little old man, how silly of you to get all excited because the train didn't come, and grumble and not sleep a wink all night. Look, here it is. It came!

Snowing again. Hamlets; tiny churches with green pointed domes; smoke motionless above the rooftops. More crows, lowering sky, snow. I looked and looked; my eyes had taken on a remote bluish depth, like the eyes of all who live in boundless plains. I looked, and suddenly round gilded domes appeared faintly in the distance against the gray-black sky.

It was about noontime; we were finally coming near, arriving finally at the new Jerusalem of the new god, the Worker, in the heart of Russia—perhaps the heart of today's world. Moscow!

Itka was waiting for me at the station. When she saw me, she laughed. “You've fallen in the trap, but don't be afraid. It's a big trap; no matter how much you walk in it you won't find its bars. That's what it means to be free. Welcome!”

I
roam from dawn to dusk, gazing with insatiable eyes at this multicolored, multispermous chaos—Moscow. The whole of the Orient is poured out over the snow. Anatolian peddlers wearing weighty turbans; Chinese with leathery, monkey-like skin selling oxhide belts and little toys of wood and paper. Every inch of sidewalk taken up by men and women vociferously retailing fruit, smoked fish, infants' bibs, drawn fowl, statuettes of Lenin. Young girls hawk newspapers, a cigarette in their mouths; women workers
go by, red kerchiefs on their heads. Fat, coarse women with Mongolian cheekbones and eyes. Half-naked children wearing dome-shaped astrakhan hats. Cripples who drag themselves along the sidewalk with outstretched hand and grovel before each passer-by. The muzhiks pass in their orange-colored cowhides, their beards thick and clotted like maize, and the air everywhere around them smells as though a herd of cows had passed.

Churches with green and gilded domes. Skycrapers. “Workers of the world, unite!” inscribed on the streets, the churches, the trams; and in red paint on the walls of a huge church, “Religion is the opiate of the masses!” Toward evening, above all this disorderly din, the deep Russian chimes suddenly resound with utmost sweetness, the chimes for the vesper service, which persists in remaining alive. . . . Chaos—that is one's first impression of Moscow.

The second is fright. In no other city of the world can you see these hard, resolute, morose faces, the flaming eyes, compressed lips, the tension and violent fever. You feel as though you have moved to a somber medieval town full of towers and battlements, where the knights are donning their armor behind barricaded doors as the enemy approaches. The atmosphere is filled with savage preparation for war. A great menace and a great hope hang over every head. Something lurks in the air here, giving rise to fear. A fiery cherubim all eyes and sword sits on the Kremlin towers like a medieval chimera on a Gothic campanile, keeping sleepless watch over Moscow with thousands of eyes, thousands of swords.

A company of red soldiers suddenly flew into the street from around a corner, their faces ferocious and rapt. The pavement shook, the pedestrians raced to get out of the way, a chubby little woman with a basket of apples shrieked from fear, and the apples spilled out and rolled over the snow, brilliantly red. The soldiers marched with heavy steps; they were wearing the pointed hat of the Mongols, and gray greatcoats which reached their feet. The officer marching in front was the first to begin to sing. I saw him as he passed in front of me. His mouth was in epileptic spasm, the veins of his throat swollen to the breaking point, sweat flowing down his cheeks. For some time he sang all alone; he seemed to be dancing as he marched, so uncontrollably ecstatic was the rhythm of his body. He sang all alone, but suddenly the soldiers took up
the song, and the frozen street burst everywhere into flame and resounded like a battlefield. A faint shudder ran down my spine. Future reality—who could tell?—knifed through me like a lightning flash. The Russians had made their appearance in a great city, London or Paris, and were pillaging it. Which is the most bloodthirsty and carnivorous of beasts? A new faith. Which is the most herbivorous? A faith that has grown old. We had entered, now, the new faith's maw.

That same evening I met the most mystical and voluptuous of muzhik poets, Nikolai Kliuev. Scanty blond beard, receding hairline; he must have been forty, and looked seventy. His voice was muted, caressing.

“I'm not one of those Russians who busy themselves with politics and cannons,” he said to me with secret pride. “I am part of the golden lode which makes fairy tales and icons. The true Russia depends on us.”

He stopped; he seemed to regret having spoken so frankly. But his inner pride had carried him away. Unable to restrain himself, he continued. “Bulls and bears cannot smash the door of fate; the heart of a dove, however, smashes it.”

He filled his glass with vodka and began to drink it sip by sip, clacking his tongue with contentment. Once more he regretted his words. Half closing his eyes, he glanced at me.

“Don't listen to me. I don't know what I'm talking about. I am a poet.”

T
he eve of the great day: the Russian Revolution was celebrating its gory birth. White, black, and yellow pilgrims had come from all over the world. In other ages, the dark-skinned races of the East would have descended similarly on Mecca, the yellow race would have gathered similarly at Benares in mute antlike swarms. The earth's centers were shifting. Today all eyes, of both friends and foes, willingly or unwillingly, whether with love or hate, were pinned on Moscow.

In the center of Red Square the contemporary Holy Sepulcher of the new Jerusalem was hooded with snow. Four-abreast in densely packed rows, thousands of pilgrims were waiting for the squat door to open. Men, women, infants, they had come from the ends of the earth to see and do homage to the red czar who lay fully alive beneath the ground. I had come with them. No one
spoke. We waited for hours in the snow and cold, our eyes riveted to the Holy Sepulcher. Suddenly a great hulk of a man moved in front of the squat door; the red guard had opened the tomb.

Slowly, by fours, without speaking, the multitudes plunged into the black entrance and vanished. I vanished with them. We descended gradually into the earth, the air heavy with the respiration and stench of people. Suddenly the drab, bovine faces of the two muzhiks preceding me became radiant, as though struck by a subterranean sun. I craned my neck. Far, far below, the large crystal which covered the sacred relics could at last be seen; flashing beneath it was the livid, bald pate of Lenin.

He lay fully alive in his gray worker's blouse, covered from the waist down by the red flag, his right hand clenched, his left opened upon his breast. His face was rosy and smiling, his short beard exceedingly blond. An air of serenity filled the high heated crystal. The Russian masses stared ecstatically, with the precise gaze they had employed just a few years earlier when they viewed the rosy, blond face of Jesus upon the gilded rood screens. This man was also a Christ, a red Christ. The essence was the same: humankind's eternal essence, made of hope and fear. Nothing had changed but the names.

I emerged onto the snow-covered square in a pensive mood. How very much this man had struggled, I reflected, full of admiration. How very much he had endured in his exile—poverty, betrayals, calumny. How even his dearest friends, frightened by his faith and obstinacy, had abandoned him! Inside that bald pate which I saw beneath the crystal, behind those small eyes, now extinguished, Russia with her villages and cities, her boundless plains, wide slow-moving rivers, and desolate tundras, had cried out and demanded freedom.

Because he was Russia's strongest and therefore most responsible soul, he believed that she was calling him, imposing on him the duty to save her. Why, after all, had she fashioned this strongest soul out of her struggles and blood and tears, if not to commit the terrible, fatal task to it?

While I paced pensively back and forth in Red Square, Itka, who had been assigned to me as a guide, kept speaking to me, and I marveled at her youthfulness and faith. As she spoke, her entire body turned to flame, just like El Greco's saints.

“Don't ask me about Lenin,” she protested. “What can I say?
Where can I begin? He isn't a man any more, he's a slogan. He has lost human characteristics and become a legend. Children born during the revolutionary years are called Lenin's children; the mysterious old man who comes on New Year's Day laden with gifts which he distributes to the children is no longer Saint Nicholas or Saint Basil, he is Lenin. All the muzhiks and little old women of the masses need a superhuman comforter, a protector; the women hang Lenin's hallowed figure on their new iconostases and light a lamp for him. In the remotest villages of Russia, everywhere from the Arctic Ocean to the tropical settlements in Central Asia, the simple folk—fishermen, plowmen, shepherds-spend their nights carving Lenin's figure while they talk, laugh, and sigh. The women embroider him in all manner of silks, the men whittle him in wood, the children sketch him on the walls with a piece of charcoal. Once he received his portrait from a small village in the Ukraine—a mosaic made from grains of wheat, with lips of red pepper.